ABSTRACT
Ancient sources from the doxographical tradition—the pseudo-Plutarch Placita, Stobaeus, Theodoret—attribute to Dicaearchus an identification of the soul as a “harmony” or attunement of the four elements; is, presumably, though we are not explicitly told so, earth, air, fire and water. Sextus in one text simply reports Dicaearchus as denying that the soul exists, but in another reports his view as being that the soul is nothing but body in a certain state—pos ekhon soma, in Stoic terminology. Nemesius couples Dicaearchus with Aristotle, whose own definition of the soul as the entelechy of an organic body he gives accurately, and claims that Aristotle and Dicaearchus regard the soul as insubstantial, by contrast with Thaies, Pythagoras and Plato. The issue of whether the soul is to be defined in terms of the body or its arrangement was to recur later in the Aristotelian tradition. Andronicus and Alexander of Aphrodisias both identified soul with the product of the mixture of the bodily elements.
